How to Type a Bullet Point on Mac (•)

The bullet is Option+8. Everywhere — plain text fields, chat boxes, spreadsheet cells, code comments, filenames. Unlike a word processor's list formatting, this is a real character you control completely. Here's the keystroke, its siblings, and when to type a bullet versus letting the app make a list.

The keystroke and its siblings

• Option+8 → • the standard bullet (U+2022) — the one you want 95% of the time.
• Option+Shift+9 → · the middle dot (U+00B7), a subtler separator: Home · About · Contact.
• From the Character Viewer: ◦ the white bullet for sub-items, ▪ the small square, ‣ the triangular bullet, and arrows like → that make fine list markers in plain text.

All are ordinary characters — they survive copy-paste into any app, live happily in Slack messages and YAML files, and never drag formatting along. They also render correctly on every platform, so a bulleted plain-text email reads the same on a colleague's PC. Mnemonic for the main one: Shift+8 is the asterisk, the typewriter-era bullet; Option+8 is its grown-up form.

Typed bullets vs. real list formatting

Rich-text apps have actual list machinery, and the distinction matters:

• Formatted lists (Notes, Pages, Word, Mail) auto-indent, renumber, and continue when you press Return. In Notes and Pages, typing - or * followed by a space at a line start converts into a formatted list automatically. Use these for documents — they behave under editing.
• Typed • characters win in plain-text contexts: commit messages, code comments, chat, form fields, filenames, and anywhere formatting can't follow. They also win when an app's auto-list behavior fights you — a typed bullet never re-indents itself or converts your next line into an unwanted list item.

If an app keeps "helpfully" converting your typed bullets or hyphens into formatted lists, look under Edit → Substitutions or the app's own settings for the list-detection toggle — that behavior belongs to each app, not to macOS.

Bullets at high volume

Writing outlines in a plain-text editor all day? Two upgrades: set a text replacement (System Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements…, +, map ;b to "• ") so the bullet arrives with its trailing space attached — and remove it any time with − in the same sheet. Or lean on the Character Viewer's memory: Ctrl+Cmd+Space, and its Frequently Used section keeps your recent symbols one double-click away.

On other layouts and on the web

The Option+8 position is remarkably stable across Mac layouts, but if your keyboard produces something unexpected, the Keyboard Viewer settles it: enable the input menu (Keyboard → Input Sources → Edit… → Show Input menu in menu bar), choose Show Keyboard Viewer, hold Option, and read where the dot lives. Writing for the web, the HTML entity is • — though a typed • in UTF-8 works everywhere modern. And in Markdown, remember the humble hyphen at line start is the bullet; the renderer draws the • for you.

When the bullet shows up uninvited

Password fields display • for every character you type — same glyph, different job, and no, you can't select those. And if you paste text from a PDF or web page and get bullets rendered as strange boxes or "•", that's an encoding mismatch in the source, not your keyboard: retype the bullet with Option+8 and it's clean U+2022 again. The character has been in every Mac font for decades; typed fresh, it renders everywhere — Windows and Android included, unlike some symbols on this keyboard layer.